Three years ago, measles came to Disneyland. 125 cases are considered connected to the outbreak by the CDC, some 45% of which were in known unvaccinated people. Another 43% were of unknown or undocumented vaccination status. Of those unvaccinated, twelve were children too young for vaccination—measles is vaccinated as part of the MMR vaccine, which is given to children at twelve months. One of those children is now just shy of three-and-a-half years old. His name is Mobius Loop. I’ve been friends with his father, Chris, since we were in grade school. Chris and Ariel have been interviewed by more than a few news outlets since then, meaning this is not a Solute exclusive, but this specific discussion was!
Chris grew up in Pasadena, California. He, like many Southern California kids, grew up going to Disneyland at least once a year. In middle school, he went with the Washington Middle School glee club to perform for the annual Magic Music Days; I had done roughly the same thing as an orchestra and marching band kid. By 2015, he and Ariel were annual pass holders. Their baby announcement was Ariel in a Baby Simba shirt with a “first visit” button on her abdomen. (It was on April Fools’ Day. The joke was that they’d gone several times before then during her pregnancy.) However, they dutifully waited until young Mobius got his TDAP, as whooping cough—another vaccine-preventable illness—is epidemic these days.
What Disney did not tell them was that there were employees at risk of being carriers. As far as Chris knows, some employees were given testing resources, but the Disney people have not given him much information. Ariel is a nurse. She knows enough to know that airborne measles is only viable for a few hours. By the time the Loops went, in mid-January, they were pretty sure that Mobius was safe.
It was the first of February when they learned for sure he was not. It’s hard to tell when a four-month-old baby starts getting really sick, but you don’t have to be a trained nurse to know that a fever and a rash are bad news. They took him to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where they entered the hospital through an airlock, just in case. And, yes, bloodwork proved it was measles. Ariel had been tested and knew she was immune; Chris joined their son in quarantine.
Three years later, Mobius is a healthy, happy kid. Albeit a healthy, happy kid with the omnipresent threat of dropping dead in another four to seven years from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. You know. According to his father, his favourite ride alternates between Small World and Winnie the Pooh. He just about drove them crazy at Christmas by singing “Jingle Bells,” the song Small World plays at Christmas instead of the original song. He’s got a younger brother, Penrose, who’s just over a year old.
Did the Loops take Penn to Disneyland before his MMR? You bet! Chris and I agreed, when we talked this over, that it would have been a bit like lightning striking twice for him to get measles as well, especially given there was no known outbreak this time around. Though they did wait for his TDAP, because whooping cough is still epidemic.
They’ve been able to explain at least some of this to Mobius. Says Chris, “Mobius is still a bit early to understand the actual event, but he absolutely understands medicine. And he understands that sometimes there’s medicine for making you feel better, and sometimes there’s medicine that prevents you from getting sick.” He’s not sure if Mobius understands that the sick little boy in those pictures is him or gets the severity of what he survived. Maybe he will when he gets older and starts reading the same kinds of children’s books I did.
How has Disney handled it? Not, in my opinion, well. When the Loops tried to contact Disney, they were directed to a PR hotline. The person to whom they spoke wouldn’t directly admit to anything or give them much information at all. They were able to speak to someone who apologized for their bad customer service experience and gave them some gift cards, but they were explicitly for the bad customer service experience. The Mouse has never acknowledged any responsibility or wrongdoing.
Chris also says that they’ve learned a lot about cognitive dissonance. You see, after their son’s diagnosis, the Loops spoke out. They had been relying on herd immunity to protect their son, the way many other parents have done since 1963, when the vaccine was developed. Herd immunity failed them because of dropping vaccination rates. They went public with their son’s illness, first in a series of Facebook posts and then in interviews with assorted news agencies. You may have seen them on CBS or CNN.
The internet reacted the way it sometimes does—by deciding that the Loops were paid actors. That Mobius did not exist to have had measles. My joke has long been that, yeah, you know what? Chris is an actor. When we met, Chris was playing Rooster in the Washington Middle School production of Annie. But Ariel’s not, and Mobius is not. There are depressingly long videos online dedicated to all the ways it’s obvious the family isn’t real. (My favourite is the one who says we won’t definitively say that the Loops are fake, but wonders what Chris’s grandmother would say about the name “Mobius.” She’s on his Facebook friends list and says she wasn’t thrilled, but she had met Chris before.) I’ve been told it’s incredibly suspicious that I just happened to be in an online discussion claiming to know them, so I was proof of the conspiracy.
There is something to be said about how hard reality crashed in on the Loops at Disneyland. They took their kid for a little harmless fantasy, and a historical reality slammed them. When Walt himself was a child, there were hundreds of thousands of cases of measles a year, with a death rate of about 2.6 percent. Improved sanitation and nutrition dropped that to about one or two cases per thousand by the time the park opened. No one actually died in the Disneyland outbreak. Though that wasn’t enough cases to be likely to cause a death. Still, I remember Chris and Ariel’s fear. It’s a fear they had every reason to expect was gone from parents’ lives in the US.
This is normally where I ask you to support my Patreon through some clever saying that I think more about than the rest of the article. Instead, I’m just begging you to vaccinate your kids and yourselves. Get your titers checked if you haven’t. Get a booster if you need to. When was your last tetanus shot? They now come paired with protection against pertussis and diphtheria, and pertussis, which is whooping cough, is now epidemic. As I may have mentioned a time or two.